The Bucket Piece

At a popular contemporary art gallery in a large city, in a small white room, place a nondescript bucket on a centered pedestal with a single light above it. A guard is stationed outside, allowing only one person in at a time. Next to the bucket is a plaque reading:

At the end of the day, any money collected in this bucket will be given to the artist. You are free to add or remove money as you wish.

This is the most elegant manifestation of the piece, but a better manifestation will get others involved. For example, donating the money to a charity instead of the artist. Or multiple buckets going to different causes. Or some kind of system measuring the contributions in real time and reporting how many children have been saved from starvation for another day.

The Beat of the World

Watching the World Clock, you can almost feel the pulse of certain statistics. It'd be interesting to make a mixtape that kept one of these statistics as the tempo throughout the entire mix. Imagine a dance party where every beat corresponds to a death. Or a birth. Or a new car/computer/bicycle. Perhaps these dance parties should be held in pairs, and which dance you were doing wouldn't be revealed until the dance was over. A chance for meditation.

Adaptive Pubs and Markets

In Brussels I saw a market where every price was displayed on a small lcd beneath the product, which also calculated the price per liter or kilogram. I imagine these were manually updated whenever the products were switched. Imagine if, instead, they were continuously updated as people bought or didn't buy the product. If fewer people were buying them, it'd be cheaper to encourage a purchase. The same idea, inverted, could be applied to pubs: instead of happy hour the prices would just go down as more people bought drinks.

The standard scheme (more demand yields higher prices) would encourage people to buy things they normally wouldn't, and browse for things that others might not have noticed. The inverted scheme (in the pub) would encourage people to bring friends and congregate at specific times.